Studia Litterarum

This article focuses on the problems around the exact dating of the final edition of Go- This article focuses on the problems around the exact dating of the final edition of Go gol’s play The Letigation read aloud by the author in house of Aksakov on his first return   to Russia from abroad (1839–1840). Gogol’s reading is famous for a peculiar hoax: the   author did not declare his intention to read the piece, so the listeners took hiccups of   his fictional character for his own. Many remembered the incident but the notes of the   memorialists on the date of the incident diverge. S.T. Aksakov mentions March 8, 1840   and I.I. Panaev  — Summer of 1839. As the episode has not been hitherto dated, Gogol   commentators put forward various conjectures about who of the memorialists made a   mistake.  Besides  using  all  available  biographical,  epistolary,  and  memoir  data  for  the   analysis of this discrepancy, the author of the paper turns to the results of the textolog ical research of Litigation and typological comparison of Aksakov’s and Panaev’s mem oirs. Both had different goals and generic intentions and thereby we observe a different   balance between facts and fiction in the memoirs of each. Aksakov made chronological   records of his communication with Gogol that were too premature to publish. Panaev   wrote for the upcoming issues of the journal  Contemporary and was concerned with entertaining his audience. Analysis of the entire complex of existing data allows date Gogol’s hoax and, consequently, the final edition of the play by March 1840.

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